Gossip and conspiracy discourse have long been epistemologically suspect, and recent critical treatments tend either to celebrate or to excoriate these social phenomena. Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip heralds a new perspective, proposing that gossiping and speculating are not only defensible but also fundamental-indeed inescapable-ways of knowing. Offering a theoretical analysis that simultaneously abjures a traditional thesis, claims wide-ranging associative liberties, and insists on the groundlessness of all truth-making, Birchall engages in a tricky balancing act; the book aims to level the relationship between academic studies and popular knowledge-production and yet, almost paradoxically, to define a more radical role for cultural studies.
 
Repeatedly the book underscores that aporia haunts all knowledge-building and that the procedures of conspiracy theory and gossip-often critiqued for their sketchy grasp on confirmed truths-resemble the methods employed even by more legitimized forms of speculation, such as traditional scholarship. Early on, Birchall acknowledges fundamental debts to Michel Foucault-particularly to Foucault’s notions about the commingling of power and knowledge within discursive formations-and to Jacques Derrida, whose ideas on aporia, trace, absence, and responsibility inform the book’s deconstruction of knowledge hierarchies. Yet the text also builds on the revaluation of gossip initiated by Patricia Meyer Spacks’s 1985 Gossip, and it echoes the impulse to link conspiracy theorizing to postmodern experience that readers will recall from both Mark Fenster’s Conspiracy Theories (1999) and Patrick O’Donnell’s Latent Destinies (2000).
 
Birchall argues that cultural studies-often assailed within the university in precisely the terms used to castigate popular knowledge-has a more radical response available to it than the ultimately conservative struggle for “legitimacy” as traditional academic scholarship. Insofar as “true justified” knowledge and the social authority it enjoys are not objective facts but, rather, culturally conferred categories of convenience, to emphasize-rather than deny or displace-aporia presents a more productive cultural studies project than keeping the secret. Accordingly, traditional analyses of phenomena such as conspiracy or gossip are insufficient if they leave intact an assumed hierarchy dividing the putative experts from those whose practices are studied. On this count, implicitly, Birchall takes issue with Spacks, whose revaluation of gossip is couched within a traditional literary analysis requiring and showcasing specialized expertise. Challenging such hierarchies between the knowers and the known, this book argues that by relinquishing expert authority, by “thinking about the status of cultural studies . . . as a form of knowledge . . . we will have learned something from popular knowledges rather than just about popular knowledges” (31, emphases in original). Accordingly, gossip and conspiracy theory model the epistemological instruction popular culture can offer.
 
Birchall disclaims early on that no “Big Theory” structures this analysis; instead, she proposes an “athetic” line of investigation, operationally defined as “a kind of speculation that doesn’t involve positing a firm thesis or which operates under a stable principle” (118). This stance, she suggests, amounts to a deconstructive move toward knowledge-building, an approach Birchall defends against assaults-from both outside and within cultural studies-by commentators who propose to be anti- or post-theoretical or who reproach cultural studies for not being more “politically responsible.” Answering those who assail the “celebratory readings,” the “optimism,” the uncritical “populism,” or otherwise “speculative” approaches in cultural studies, Birchall reminds us that deconstruction has destabilized metaphysical certainties about the “political.” Sanctioning critical play instead, the book charges that scolding colleagues for their putative political irresponsibility betokens an unwittingly reactionary and destructive moralism that amounts to discursive border-patrolling. “If cultural studies is to be up to the job of understanding popular knowledges,” the author argues, it needs to avoid such prescriptions; “it has to consider the consequences of moralism displacing theory. . . . Moralism is nostalgia: it performs a politics appropriate to a different age” (26). Birchall’s response to reproaches couched in terms of an a priori “politics”-somewhat like that of the conspiracy theorist toward “official” culture-is to eschew debate with such assailants and to instead invoke an alternative discursive community. This strategy to emulate conspiracy is anything but accidental, for-true to what it advocates-the book does not simply study conspiracy theory and gossip; it also deliberately takes instruction from them.
 
The author acknowledges up front the inevitably speculative nature of the book’s contentions, but-for better and for worse-speculation, like “athesis,” means never having to argue for underlying assumptions and what some might deem arbitrary associations.¹ To mute the charge that her argument is hypothetical, for instance, Birchall asks how we can sort between causal and arbitrary connections. Capitalizing on this empirical liberty, she asserts a parallel among conspiracy theory-building, gossip, deconstruction, and cultural studies. All of these, Birchall argues, are “avatars for the undecidability . . . [and] the instability of knowledge, for the alterity that resides ‘within’ knowledge” (32). Here instability is not something to bemoan, but rather a condition to make peace with-or even make the most of-like the suspension of the gold standard or the dynamic of unfettered exchange. Not surprisingly, then, another connection that the text proposes among gossip, conspiracy theory, and cultural studies is their shared amenability to commodification. Knowledge and its marketability underpin academic anxiety about legitimacy, for
 

In order to sell knowledge, in order for it to have value, the knowledge economy has to disguise the aporetic tension between the impossibility and possibility of legitimate knowledge at the foundation of all knowledge: service providers and retailers have to convince consumers and shareholders to invest in knowledge by presenting it as useful, authoritative, unique, legitimate, and as theirs to sell in the first place. What is in fact risky speculation (investing in a knowledge that holds the trace of its own illegitimacy within it) with no appeal to a final authority, no guarantee of a profit, is presented as a safe investment.
 

(125)

Paradoxically, blowing the whistle on this pyramid scam promises to make cultural studies not less but more productive-hence more valuable-and this process entails learning from the market-friendliness of conspiracy and gossip. For Birchall, such cultural artifacts as The X-Files represent instances of distinct new markets for alternative explanations, exchange-sites wherein something as quaint as credence is not even required. Whereas once alternative voices had been marginalized, technological advances such as the Internet have witnessed conspiracy theory’s “emergence [as] a distinct but disparate commercial industry” (35), one whose entertainment value obviates qualms about plausibility. By now, conspiracy has metamorphosed into a generalized willingness to sell and be sold alternative stories. Like Samuel Coleridge’s ideal fiction readers, conspiracy’s “audience, in fact, is being asked to suspend its disbelief, rather than to believe” (40). In Birchall’s reformulation, conspiracy, like tabloid gossip, accrues legitimacy not as a narcissistic and presumably paranoid, “truth” system, as O’Donnell infers, and not as an impulse to make mainstream discourse more inclusive, as Fenster proposes, but simply as a diversion for proliferating separatist audiences.

 
Birchall shares with Fenster and O’Donnell the premise that conspiracy narratives trade in a refusal of contingency and randomness, preferring instead the premise that hidden but identifiable causes and effects structure what appear as discrete phenomena. These narratives authorize what some might deem wildly associative connections wherein “[r]andom events . . . are translated into components of far-reaching schemes.” These schemes are salient, not because they are persuasive, but because they fill critical coverage gaps analogous to market sectors (Birchall 45-6). For instance, Knowledge Goes Pop singles out the death of Princess Diana and the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center as events in which the demand for information outstripped the supply by mainstream reportage and created the type of vacuum a market abhors, a space enthusiastically filled by alternative hawkers of the “real” story. Uniquely, Birchall speculates that legitimated mainstream discourse-be it journalistic, political, or academic-indulges similar narrative strategies. That is, the hot scoop and the groundbreaking research project attract us because they assemble a new story based on available but previously un(der)interpreted evidence. The purity of the presumably legitimate press, moreover, proves questionable once alternative reportage on Diana or 9/11 gets co-opted by “official” news producers-ostensibly for scoffing purposes-and, in effect, later retailed at a reduced risk by the mainstream media.
 
Gossip, which “trade[s] in a tension between the public and the private,” functions in much the same manner as conspiracy theories do (92): out of concealed or otherwise unconnected events it assembles and sells a new story. The market here is equally vigorous, deconstructive even, because “[g]ossips are never sated. The revelation of secrets (true or untrue) does not satisfy-the desire to reveal or receive simply gets deferred elsewhere, searching for new material in an endless exchange of signifiers parading as signifieds” (24). As with conspiracy theory, gossip privileges discussion over conclusion and prolongs iteration over closure; thus, it mobilizes deconstructive principles. The meaning of particular items of gossip is beside the point, for instance, since “even when gossip passes information on, iterability ensures that it is haunted by the trace of the possible ‘death’ of the source of the gossip, making it always ‘other’ from the ‘original’ in that repetition” (136). Like Spacks, Birchall aims to rescue gossip from the pejorative connotations historically attached to it. In an independent move, however, this book underscores the fundamentality of the gossip market. Far more than an object of scholarly analysis, “gossip is a constitutive necessity: which is . . . very different from saying that it plays an important role in society” (108). Gossip “is at the heart of cognition, conditioning any history of knowledge or claim to knowledge put forward within the socio-cultural sphere” (108). To hold forth-even about gossip-is to gossip, in other words; gossiping and professing are synonymous in that both propose to make new sense continuously out of available circumstances. Ultimately, Birchall challenges Spacks’s project, and others like it, which leave intact the expert/object of study divide.
 
Repeatedly, Birchall draws telling parallels in the stances assumed by commentators on gossip, conspiracy theory, and deconstruction; here, it might be argued, the speculative stance and canny “conspiracy” strategy come in handy, for employing these two liberates Birchall to claim premises and connections which themselves need not be exhaustively supported. Accordingly, the book posits but does not overtly argue for the idea that the very effort to maintain the purity of the separate practices of journalism, critical theory, and cultural studies implies corresponding parallels across these fields. Many descriptions of alternative discourses actually function like fences around an in-group. Memorably, in Literary Theory, Terry Eagleton paved the way for this insight by pointing out how some signifiers that pretend to name signifieds actually function to designate belonging or exclusion; “weed,” he observed, does not identify any particular plant, per se, but instead designates any number of nameless plants whose shared characteristic is mainly their unwelcomeness in one’s garden. Implicitly, Birchall mobilizes this insight, suggesting that terms such as “paranoid” or “hysteric” identify only that some forms of utterance will not count as legitimate discourse. In journalism, for instance, the book interrogates what Mark Lawson had identified as a “collapse in editorial authority” in the mainstream journalistic incorporation of popular hypotheses about Diana’s death; Birchall locates a similar conservatism in Elaine Showalter’s book, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (1998). Birchall finds that these approaches-like those of people who critique cultural studies-ultimately function to narrow what can be uttered by denying legitimacy from discursive “outliers.” Showalter’s diagnosis of conspiracy theories as a form of collective hysteria itself represents, Birchall suggests, a paranoid response to paranoia. Moreover, aporia-an inescapable doubt or undecidability-underlies the psychoanalytic system upon which Showalter’s dismissal of hysteria rests since Freud himself acknowledged the speculative dimensions of psychoanalytic “science.”
 
Birchall identifies a similar discursive border-policing in Umberto Eco’s responses to deconstruction, specifically within Eco’s complaint against the “Hermetic drift” presumably implied by deconstructive approaches to truth. Taking issue with Eco’s designation of the interpretive limits of deconstruction, Birchall’s book connects these complaints to Showalter’s diagnosis of conspiracy theorists. In a critical maneuver that literary theorists might find suspect, Birchall locates Eco’s take on deconstruction partly within ideas expressed by one of Eco’s fictional characters, the suggestively named “Casaubon,” in Foucault’s Pendulum.² For Birchall, Casaubon embodies Eco’s critique of “forms of overinterpretation,” which is to say interpretations guided by an uncorroborated, everything-is-connected approach that echoes the worldview of the conspiracy theorist (77). Fictional characters are problematic sources of authorial view and propensities, however. In Eco’s work, a monolith known as social consensus enables an equally monolithic “us” to adjudicate which readings do not qualify as legitimate, to sideline, in effect, persuasive flowers from overinterpretive weeds. Eco’s overinterpreters, then-deconstructionists, that is-share the fate of Showalter’s hysterics; both get excluded from the metaphysical community of “rational” interpreters. But the exclusion in either case, Birchall maintains, is arbitrary and the community is fictional.
 
And what if “the community” were not one? Birchall questions Eco’s notion of “consensus” by recalling François Lyotard’s critique of that same category in Jürgen Habermas’s work. Lyotard’s insight had been to establish that Habermas links “consensus” to a progress narrative that we might fruitfully question-“a concept tied to a narrative of emancipation,” in Birchall’s phrase-one that Lyotard finds (in his own words) “insufficient.” Following Lyotard, Birchall proposes value-neutral terms that help detach consensus from its role in this ideological narrative; here consensus is redefined simply as “a politico-economic instrument” (80). Thus, discredited narratives and their promulgators are not silenced by an official community any more than they struggle to widen that community. Instead, they turn for their sustenance to alternative audiences. Showalter and Eco fail in related ways to conceive of the possibility that those whose interpretations are excluded-the gossip and the paranoid along with the deconstructive cultural theorist-might seek and find sympathetic communities outside the rational paradigm or interpretive community. Discourse, in this reinterpretation, involves “dissensus” at least as often as consensus. To be sure, these connections among popular knowledge, deconstructive theories, and the cultural studies enterprise involve the same kind of wildly associative leap indulged by conspiracy theorists and gossips; about this Birchall is clearly conscious and for it the author is plainly unapologetic. The implied stance is that you don’t have to buy it unless you find it productive; conversely, if you find it productive that is legitimacy enough. In short, this book is a fully conscious illustration of reality-production, not simply a “study” of it; it is an audacious and energizing implementation some of deconstruction’s most provocative implications.
 
To invoke Birchall’s economic metaphors by way of summary, the book invites cultural studies to capitalize on a situation in which speculation is all there is. Since gossip and conspiracy-along with knowledge itself-ultimately correspond only to the forces of supply and demand, the upshot is: why not sell something new and generative? Knowledge Goes Pop insists that it isn’t marketing out-and-out relativism, and it faintly acknowledges that the desire to assign or to withhold credit for individual interpretations is not wrong or unusual. Indeed, “cultural theorists have to measure the soundness of an interpretation every time they look for information on the Internet, every time . . . they review the research of peers or examine student work” (82). But the tools with which soundness might be weighed are less in evidence than the myriad prospects for operating without apprehension of such tools. Almost as an afterthought, Birchall claims that what rescues this radical freedom to posit absolutely anything from solipsism or “irresponsibility” is a deconstructive redefinition of what “responsibility” entails. Calling on Derrida, Birchall likens “responsibility” to a heightened attentiveness to that which is radically singular, a responsiveness to particularity, and rests finally in a familiar kind of paradox, the deconstructive refusal to systematically define “responsibility.”
 
Of course, generalized rules for responsible behavior can both limit and safeguard us, and the particularization of responsibility can imply either liberation or constriction. Liberating as the book’s speculations are, they also generate some reservations. In Chapter Five, “Sexed Up: Gossip by Stealth,” for instance, Birchall offers an extended application of gossip-configured both as object of study and as analytical approach-in order to assess the role played by unsubstantiated speculation in the British and American justification for the 2003 Iraq war. This chapter is intriguing and, whether wittingly or not, the particular application it offers serves to dramatize tensions otherwise masked by the book’s celebration of aporia. The book quotes N. Fairclough’s observation that ideology governs our decision whether to prioritize content or context in weighing the soundness of reportage. When a newspaper shares the ideological concerns of its sources, Fairclough posits,
 

the reported discourse is not generally demarcated from the report itself . . . there is generally a focus upon the ideational meaning (the “content“) of the reported discourse and a neglect of its interpersonal meanings and its context.
 

(48, emphases mine)

This observation seems persuasive; journalistic reports on official statements-press releases by political figures, say-usually do tend to focus on content and downplay context. Reports on popular and “unofficial” knowledge, on the other hand, generally do seem to focus inordinately on context. As I read through this extended chapter ostensibly showing how gossip functioned in the lead-up to the Iraq war, however, I kept returning to this tension between content and context. Following Fairclough’s logic, I reasoned that readers whose worldview coincides with Birchall’s “gossip” might be inclined to prioritize the chapter’s content; on the other hand, readers whose interpretation of events contrast with Birchall’s might be inclined to seek contextual explanations for positions expressed in this chapter (which seem to exceed their stipulated purpose) and even for the chapter’s role in Birchall’s book, in the first place. Unequivocally, I would position myself within the former collectivity-a choir member if this report on gossip’s role in a gratuitous war could be called preaching-and yet the chapter came to feel strangely out of place in the context of this book. It runs the risk of sacrificing point to case, and in doing so it recalls Birchall’s memorable insight that, in gossip, one finds “signifiers parading as signifieds.” Upon finishing the book, I ruminated again on this unusual chapter and-perhaps cynically-I find myself speculating that perhaps the reverse could be equally plausible: that signifieds can masquerade as signifiers and, in this instance, that the case might actually be the point, that the book provides a pretext for this critique even if the reverse were also true. “Gossip by stealth,” indeed.

 
Consonant with this unsettlement about gossip as a knowledge-making procedure, the jubilation over aporia which the book stirred in general is dissipated when I weigh particular instances of radical speculation. Now, the utility-nay, the sheer mischief-of outfoxing scolds of any stripe presents a bandwagon onto which many a freedom-loving soul might hop, and I’m no exception. Likewise, the idea that those with alternative perspectives may prefer to address like-minded fellow exiles before abjectly appealing to imperious insiders has a revolutionary appeal to it-all the more so, perhaps, when posed in the name of deconstructive cultural study. But the vulnerability to incaution haunts this euphoria, too; there is something vaguely sobering, for instance, about shrugging off as “dissension” the bids for narrative legitimacy posed by, say, Holocaust- or evolution-deniers, given the political ambitions sometimes associated with such alternative explanations. In his review of Spacks’s Gossip, in fact, Steven G. Kellman frames a similar reservation with respect to the politics surrounding gossip in literature. Acknowledging the breadth of the author’s celebratory references to gossip in British and American texts, Kellman underscores, just the same, the slant imposed by any highly selective application of a generalized theory. Pointedly the reviewer observes that “there is far less gossip within Nineteen Eight-Four than within Barchester Towers, Vanity Fair, or any of Spacks’ other exemplary fictions” (153). Kellman’s point is that Spacks is reading literature quite selectively, isolating only texts where freedom of speculation is a given. In the same way, one can say, Birchall’s dismissal of those who worry about the “politics” of deconstruction takes for granted the climate of discursive liberty that “politically” oriented critics assume must be guarded. Gossip and speculation flourish, in other words, in contexts where civil liberty can be taken for granted, and the scolding of politically-minded worry warts conveys useful cautions. Repeatedly, Birchall urges that we “take on board” the idea that aporia underlies all knowledge-making, that we, too-deconstructionists, postmodernists, students of culture-go ahead and capitalize on aporia. After a while, my inner copy editor wishes to see that verb varied, and yet-rightly or not-I intuit an authorial reluctance to substitute one sensible alternative: “embrace.” Like sea water or pirates-perhaps like global and theoretical currents now so pervasive as to have de-legitimized resistance more than anything else-aporia is urged on us, each paddling our disparate canoes, each presumably learning to stop worrying and love the marketplace of ideas. That the invitation is attractive is a fact simultaneously invigorating and dispiriting. I am not at all sure that this is the brand of aporia that Birchall’s book consciously endorses, but it lurks here nevertheless.